Events in the New World (1786-1917)
The POD is the death of George Washington, occurring in 1786, after American Independence is established, but before George Washington's influence on the constitutional convention. Most importantly, a strong executive is not created, since no one could be trusted with that power, and a three person executive council is adopted instead. Without a strong central government, the USA quickly dissolves into thirteen different states plus Vermont. Virginia consolidates control over Kentucky. North Carolina consolidates control over Tennessee, and Georgia takes Alabama and Mississippi, as well as Louisiana east of the Mississippi. Eventually, it will conquer most of Spanish Florida, with an armistice line between it and an independent Seminole state in the south that uses the familiar marshy terrain to avoid conquest by the Georgians. Without a central government to negotiate Jay's Treaty, Britain is never dislodged from the Great Lakes region, and controls everything between Pennsylvania, Canada, and the Ohio River, which is eventually consolidated into the colony of Indiana. Sensing weakness, Britain invades the former colonies, but is repulsed, taking away nothing but Maine for its troubles, referred to as British Massachusetts. Later, after the Napoleonic Wars, Britain acquires the Louisiana Territory for its empire. From here, it spreads unapposed to occupy the entire Oregon Territory, which is still partly settled by pioneers from the American states of the east coast.
As another result of the Napoleonic Wars, Brazil bloodlessly becomes independent of Portugal in 1822 (an event that actually happened in our timeline). Inspired by this, the Spanish New World Colonies begin bloody revolutions. Cautioned rather than inspired by the model of the American Revolution, two centralized monarchies emerge, The Kingdom of South America stretching from Columbia to Argentina and the Empire of Mexico stretching from Panama to California, with military signors quickly replacing kings.
The Texan Revolution occurrs as scheduled, backed by the British rather than the Americans, as well as a Mormon Revolution in Deseret, which develops into a Sikh-like military order, also backed by the British Empire. Texas consists roughly of the old province of Texas, a relatively small square hugging the Gulf of Mexico in the east and occupying some of Louisiana west of the Mississippi. Deseret consists of our Utah, plus some of the adjacent Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming, bordering Oregon Country to the north and Louisiana Country to the northeast. This allows the British to seize Panama, Baja California, and the Californian coast from a war-weary and militarily inferior Mexico. The British begin a canal project in malarial Panama that will be finished in the 1910s.
The Old World, World War I, and some of its effects
In the Old World, affairs continue more or less as they would have until 1917, except that Liberia is founded as a New Jersey colony which gains independence in 1847 and later conquered by France. Also, the Spanish Empire in the Carribean and the Philippines never falls. Alaska is still part of Russia and Hawaii becomes a British possession in 1896. More broadly, Republican ideals are somewhat discredited, as the negative examples of Haiti, America, and France weigh on Europeans.
World War I continues for years longer than it would have otherwise. The Ottoman Empire, the sick man of Europe, is the first to sue for peace after Russia, though it leaves the conflict with land in the Caucuses, and takes advantage of the Russian Civil War to take more land in Southern Russia. The Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolves, and is absorbed by Germany. Eventually, Britain, which feels more secure as an island, can no longer fight, and withdraws. Enraged, an invaded France and an Italy hungry for land in the Balkans, must sign a true armistice, an uneasy peace where nations rule whatever land they occupy. Germany occupies a betrayed and exhausted Belgium as well as a valuable and coal-rich slice of Northern France. France controls Togoland and Cameroon. Britain controls German New Guinea and Southwest Africa. Thanks to one of the great German commanders, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, Germany retains Tanganyika and uses it as an advance base to conquer the Congo. In Eastern Europe, the Germans consolidate power over the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including Austria itself, which had seceded and willingly joined Germany; the Russian Brest-Litovsk cessions of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Finland, and the Baltics; Serbia; and Rumania.
In Western Europe, disgust and frustration reign, leading to fascist movements. Mussolini and Salazar take over in Italy and Portugal respectively. Francois de la Rocque of the Fascist Croix-de-Feu takes over in France. Later, Franco takes over Spain, supported by Mussolini and de la Rocque. On the bright side, without the Harvey-Smoot Tariffs there is no Great Depression.
A Sick Man Gets Better
Whereas the Ottoman Empire was formerly the sick man of Europe, its new oil lands in the Caucuses give it new life. Hungry for more, the Turk picks fights with Persia in the Gulf, eventually conquering that country. Using its new power, the Ottomans consolidate control over the Nejd, officially part of their empire but de facto independent, and their wildest dreams are realized when the largest oil reserves in the world are discovered there in 1938. Meanwhile, the Ottomans seek to reassert their great power status by reconquering Balkan land. Mussolini, seeking to revive the glory of Rome, also takes advantage of the weak Balkan states. Italy ends up with Albania and Montenegro, while the Ottomans get Greece and Bulgaria. During this time, a national homeland for the Jews begins to take shape. Beginning in 1897 in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, European Jews buy farms in Palestine and move there to avoid persecution, especially from the pogroms in Germany and Russia. During this period, roughly a quarter of all Palestinians are Jewish, and that proportion is rising. The movement is acknowledged by the Sultan and Jewish Palestine occupies a mostly autonomous but subordinate position in the Ottoman political organization. Periodic riots by Palestinian Arabs against their Jewish neighbors occur, but the government in Istanbul opposes the pogroms and defends the Jews.
Postwar Germany and War in the West
Meanwhile, Germany is remarkably stable. It is dominated by the old war dictator, Hindenburg, and his faithful lieutenant Ludendorff. The Kaysar Wilhelm II and the Reichstagg, led by aristocrat and former storm trooper Chancellor Ernst Junger, form the other two parts of a strange checks and balances system, albeit one heavily weighted towards the military branch. A relatively unknown man, an injured war veteran and former political spy, dies of old age in prison after an unpopular and even-more laughably failed putsch. Unlike the western powers, Germany sees war and conquest as a positive good, inspired by the heritage of Prussian militarism, the great wars of German unification, and the huge territorial acquisitions of World War I. Naturally, Hindenburg orders the conquest of Holland, Luxembourg, and Scandinavia. Wary of war with Britain, the Germans make sure to control the Atlantic parts of the Denmark-Iceland Union, reasoning that Greenland and the Faroe Islands would be useful in attacking Britain and Canada. This is not lost on a war-weary Britain.
Wary of the radical and threatening fascist regimes of the west, Germany invades France and Italy, with designs against Spain and Portugal. The Ottomans move into Italian Albania and Montenegro. Worried that Germany has finally bitten off more than it can chew, a moderate faction in the Reichstag led by Franz Von Pappen organizes a deal where Germany will formally recognize any French, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese land that it can subdue, encouraging an alliance between them. This repairs Turkish-German relations, which were somewhat tarnished since the Ottoman separate peace. Quickly, the Ottomans establish control over the islands of the Western Mediterranean, the colonies of North Africa, and Grenada, allowing Germany to easily conquer the rest of the fascist block.
Finally and unwisely, Germany turns its attention to an isolationist Britain, formerly content to stay away from the disgusting politics of fascism, communism, and authoritarianism on the continent. Germany demands return of Southwest Africa. Winston Churchill, who naturally has been arguing for Britain to fight France, Germany, and Russia with India tied behind its back, is propelled to the leadership of the British Empire. After a failed invasion of Norway, and disastrous action in North Africa where Montgomery is trounced by the Desert Fox, Churchill is given the order of the boot in favor of Lord Halifax. Realizing he can continue Churchill's use of strategic bombing Without serious consequence, Halifax shifts the war effort to the air. During this period, the British assert control over Malagast, repelling a German invasion. Soon, intelligence is recovered that an amphibious landing is forthcoming in northern Scotland from forward bases in the Faroe Islands. After winning a brutal naval and marine campaign in the North Atlantic islands, Halifax sues for peace, and gets it. When the dust settles, Germany has consolidated control over Western Europe and the French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonies of Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as Southwest Africa. The Ottomans, weanwhile, have taken Gibraltar, Cyprus, Malta, the Ionian Islands, British Northeast Africa, Somaliland, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the Trucial States, Oman, Aden, and Italian Abbysinia, giving them control over Suez, Hormuz, and Bab-el-Mandeb.
The Evil Empire and its war with Germany
Meanwhile, the Soviet Empire had proceeded more or less as it would have otherwise. Germans defeated the white leaders Yudenich and Wrangel in western Russia and the Ottomans defeated Denikin in the Caucuses. Future historians would speculate that without these battles, Soviet Russia would never have been formed, though they'd be wrong of course. Lenin and then Stalin rose to power in Russia, though they fought no wars of conquest to reclaim Georgia or Ukraine, not risking confrontation with Germany or the Ottomans. During the Russian Civil War, the Soviets acquired their first satellite state in Mongolia, which willingly broke off from China to join the Soviets. As Japan built its empire in Manchuria, the powers came into conflict in Mongolia during the Kalkit-Gol Quasi War, which the Soviet Empire won, thereby keeping Mongolia. Japan recovered from this misadventure easily, taking advantage of the chaos in Europe to conquer the colonies of Malaysia, Burma, Indonesia, Indochin, New Guinea, and the Philippines. In east Asia, Japanese settlers are given prime farmland, and colonial elites are soon common throughout the Japanese Empire. Japan's conquest of Burma sends shock waves through India, which relies on Burma for rice. Millions starve. It also takes Thailand and conquers the eastern seaboard of China, eventually pushing the civil war between Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-Shek into the inland. The Soviet-backed Mao succeeds in turning western China, Tibet, eastern Turkistan, Bhutan, and Nepal into a Soviet satellite. During the Chinese Civil War, Germany invades the Soviet Empire, blaming them for labor riots in Eastern Europe and wary of their impenetrable spy ring in Berlin and bloodthirsty propaganda of worldwide Marxist revolution. This solidifies a natural alliance between Germany, Japan, which seeks land in Russian Manchuria, and the Ottoman Empire, which wants Central Asia, against Russia. This proves to be a lasting alliance, sometimes referred to as the nationalist bloc. An oil poor nation with its Caucuses land taken, the Soviet Empire finds it difficult to field modern armies, but its vast land and endless population prevail eventually, aided by General Winter and General Mud. The Germans capture and burn Moscow, but the Soviet leadership retreats east and the Red Army pushes the Germans west. Japan was contained, but made gains in Sakhalin, Siberia, and the Aleutian Islands. The Soviets end up pushing the Ottomans south, through the Caucuses and out of Georgia. The Red Army pushes the Germans out of Sweden and Norway. They retake Rumania, and much of Poland. Perhaps the Germans would have been pushed back to Berlin if they hadn't unleashed a new weapon, developed in secret by celebrated Austrian physicist Albert Einstein, that devastated oncoming troops and made the borderland radioactive and impassable for a time. Quickly, the Soviet spy ring got hold of the weapon. Britain followed suit, as well as Japan and the Ottoman Empire not much later. The great powers could no longer attack each other directly, for fear of annihilation, but they could play a circumspect game with proxies and colonies. To oppose the nationalists, the British and Soviets form an alliance called the double entente.
Cold War
Germany, seeking to expand its power, brought naval power to bear against orphaned colonies in Guyana and the Carribean. A small naval engagement was fought with British ships from Guyana and the Bahamas, leaving Britain with expanded control in Latin America, and restoring some of the tattered prestige to her Royal Navy.
Japan, meanwhile, swept through the Pacific Ocean, taking the most valuable islands with its still unique reliance on naval aircraft. Britain, however, makes some gains, taking back the eastern third of Burma and nearly half of New Guinea. Operations in Burma do little to solve the problem of the Indian famine, since most of the colony's resources are now devoted to fighting the Japanese rather than growing rice.
On the other side of the ocean, the Japanese have landed in the Kingdom of South America. They carve out a narrow strip of territory in the west, but are opposed by Soviet backed Marxist insurgents, overthrowing the old signer and essentially turning the majority of the kingdom into a satellite state.
While the overextended and constantly warring British state becomes more totalitarian at home, it begins to give autonomy to its dominions of Canada (comprising all of British North America, including Louisiana, Oregon, Indiana, and British Massachusetts), Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa. Fifteen years into the Indian famine, after ill planned attempts to terraform the Australian outback, costly arrangements are finally made to grow grain in South Africa, Rhodesia, and Bechuanaland and convey it by convoy through the Ottoman infested Indian Ocean to relieve the famine in India.
In Africa, small scale border wars take place periodically between British and German colonies, with little changes made to borders. Black, Coloured, and Asian South Africans are given more power over the colony as the English-hating Afrikaners are increasingly suspected, with justification, of trying to turn over British colonies in the region to Germany.
Playing on popular antisemitism, Soviets and the British back Jihadi terror organizations apoplectic over the national homeland for the Jews in Ottoman Palestine, causing serious problems for the regime. Similar events backfire on the Soviets, as they are drawn into a quagmire in the new satellite state of Afghanistan, which quickly relapsed into conservative capitalist chaos. Roughly coterminous with this is a series of market reforms in the Soviet Empire, designed to make the Empire slightly more laissez faire without sacrificing the power of the party. It succeeds in making the country slightly more wealthy. War continues sporadically in China, Burma, and Indonesia, forcing Japan to fight to hold onto its asian possessions. In the great hunn tradition of the Blitz, short range missiles are shot from northern France across the channel, many of which are shot down over the channel by an English missile defense system.
Collapse and More Collapse
Eventually, however, Britain and the Soviet Empire must fall. Britain is overextended and fighting for its colonies on all fronts. The Soviet Empire is similarly overextended, committed to worldwide empire, and chained to a retarding economic system, surprisingly hard to consign to the dustbin of history. As the double entente falters, Britain is forced to expel its dominions and old world colonies from its commonwealth. The Germans, sensing weakness, attack the Soviets, and reestablish the Brest-Litovsk borders in the east, ruling from Barcelona to Belarus. The Ottomans retake their old possessions in southern Russia. The Germans push southward in Africa, taking British colonies in the western and southern sections. The Japanese take over Mongolia and push farther into China. Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan break free from the Soviets. Central Asia devolves into a Hobbesian warscape of rival armies, including Afghanistan, East Turkistan, and some of the Turkic sections of European Russia. A bloody insurgency is fought out in India, with Ottomans entering from the west and Japanese from the east, with the remnants of a Sepoy army defending the area around New Delhi. The Japanese consolidate power over all of the Kingdom of South America and take Alaska, the Aleutians, and the east coast of Russia. Now it was the nationalist's turn to be overextended. A military coalition of the former British dominions forms, rallying together to beat the weakened nationalists. In a series of bloody quagmire wars, Germany is pushed out of Africa, leaving behind an independent and aggressive Afroreich led by a large and influential ethnically German minority centered in Cameroon and Congo, which is allied with former Ottoman states and frequently comes into conflict with Nigeria and South Africa. South Africa ends up controlling most of the land south of the equator, the border being the Afroreich, the Congo river, and the new states of Kenya and Uganda. An independent India and the newly formed Commonwealth of Australia and New Zealand rally together to oppose Japan. Britain defends its remaining New World colonies from Japanese domination. The Central Asian war zone is unified into a greater Kazakhstan, save for Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, under the old Soviet party secretary of the Kazakh Worker's State, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had access to nukes. New states pop up like dandelions in the Middle East and Africa: Iran, which seizes Azerbaijan and the former Turkmen Worker's State, Sudan, Somaliland, which comprises what we're British, French, and Italian colonies of the Horn of Africa and Abyssinia before they became an Ottoman province and then an independent state, Kenya, Uganda, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morrocco, and the former British West African colonies of Gambia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, and Nigeria, as well as German Liberia, all of which which expand to occupy the valuable coastline of West Africa. Seperatist rebellions are staged in Western Sahara, South Sudan, and Abyssinia, Abyssinia being the only successful one. Seperatist rebellion is staged in Egypt, but is crushed by the Ottomans in order to keep control of Suez. The worthless land of the Sahara interior is left essentially unclaimed except by loose confederations of Bedouins fleeing from Ottoman Arabia, representing a new religious movement seeking to live as Mohammad did. Japan is defeated by a coalition of India, CANZ, Canada, Britain, the Kingdom South America, Mexico, and Brazil, but India insists that it retain Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Mongolia, and Manchuria, remembering the Great Game against Russia during the nineteenth century and seeking to limit Russian ambitions in the region. Korea is given independence, but quickly falls to a coup from ethnically Japanese generals who institute a Japanese style military dictatorship. China, minus Manchuria, Tibet, or East Turkistan, is given independence under a former Soviet puppet ruler, but likewise falls to a coup backed by the old Japanese colonial elite. Carving up the rest of the Japanese Empire, India expands to include the South Asian mainland, and the Commonwealth of Australia and New Zealand acquires the islands of the Pacific Ocean, including the Phillippines and Indonesia. Canada gets Alaska, Anadyr, Kamchatka, and the rest of the eastern Russian coast north of Manchuria.
In the New World, tensions boil to a head, and Deseret and Texas attack Mexico, Texas pushing its borders to the Rio Grande in the south and Deseret in the northeast, and Deseret pushes southwest, pushing the Mexican border roughly to where its real border is in our timeline.